Floral Mandala

Back to my mandala practice, full blast.

For this mandala, I am inspired by Louise Gale’s beautiful book Botanical Mandalas. I have only just flicked through the first pages of the book and, already, all I want to do is grab my compass, journal and art supplies and mandala (is that a verb? we’ll say it is!) all day long!!!

SUPPLIES USED

Maped compass (very basic but my favourite nevertheless; I love that you can attach to it any pen or pencil you like)

sketchbook

graphite pencil and eraser

Uni Pin Fine Line pens in black 0.8 and 0.3

a ruler, a protractor and a circles template protractor

Tombow markers in 991, 062, 946, 195, 723, 772, 725 and 673

This mandala’s process was totally intuitive.

I started by drawing 2 lines across my page, meeting each end, so that I could find the centre of my page. I then drew my outside circle and some smaller ones. My next step was to use my protractor to draw more or less equal sections – this creates a mandala grid, from which I used as a guide to draw each element of my mandala.

I used an online image of a lotus to use as a reference – even though I drew them wrong, but nevermind, I then added a few lines to “rectify” the shape.

After my mandala was created, I coloured in the sections with my Tombow markers. I decided on these for a few reasons. First the brush tip is very fine, enabling more precision (I’m notorious for going over the lines!). Also, my paper was not particularly thick (I would say 120gsm) so other markers might have bled through the page. Lastly, I love the Tombow colours as the pastels are not too vibrant and other colours are quite vibrant though not overpowering. I find that my Crayola supertips can be quite dark, even for lighter colours.

After completing the video, I decided to add a few more dots on the outside of my mandala to bring variety of length (the design is not enclosed inside the circle, but actually go beyond).